“We Like Things That Continue to Twist Us.” A Chat with Ander Monson, Editor of DIAGRAM

For seventeen years, DIAGRAM has been publishing an online mix of found diagrams, schematic drawings, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, video, audio, and hybridized pieces. Ander Monson, its founding editor, is the author of six books and a [website], among other things. Two books are forthcoming from Graywolf: The Gnome Stories and I Will Take the Answer, both in 2019. He also edits the website Essay Daily, and the New Michigan Press.

Interview by Annie Kim

I want to start with a poem from Susan Howe’s "Souls of the Labadie Tract" (2007) I was reading yesterday:

To go down the bay or

cross back bridle time

hold fast mere wanton

gilding almost nothing

Thus poems diagrams

crying out, “Oh, Oh—”

We are strangers here

on pain of forfeiture

The word “diagrams” caught my attention, of course, but the urgency in the idea of poems as diagrams (moving towards?), their crying out, struck me. Does any of this catch you? I’m thinking specifically about DIAGRAM’s interest in representation, naming, pointing, and schematics, which is refreshingly different from most “here’s what we like” statements in journals.

Those “here’s what we like” statements are always pretty bogus, but I guess we editors feel like we have to write them? What every editor wants is to have readers spend time with what they publish and make their own assessments. No one likes to explain the idiosyncrasies of their subjectivity because either you have to be ridiculously general when you get down to making blanket statements or you sound petty when you detail some minor prohibition (no sea turtles). The best scenario is that you can be entertaining, and it helps if you have some sense of identity for what you want to look like, at least, and see if that look can convey something that your statement itself cannot. And I think I get into some of the headspace you’re talking about down in question 3, which I answered first, contrarian as I guess I am by nature.

I’m not sure if I love or hate the term “transgeneric,” but the work DIAGRAM publishes definitely gets a lot energy from genre borders—what you’ve called the “seam” in a piece called “Short Lessons in Hybridity” on Essay Daily. Can you talk about what excites you guys as editors when it comes to hybrid or hybrid-seeming pieces?

I’m glad that “hybridity” is getting a little more action among writers and readers these days, but it’s also kind of a sad testament to how effective we’ve been in delineating those borders and how strong they are or ought to be that we get that excited about the idea of violating them. Writers have been transgressing forever. It’s not new. Well, I guess we should take our excitement where we can get it, and it can give you a sense of freshness and adventure when you go off the map like that, and that electricity is certainly one of the things we key into as readers and editors. And in part because we began in part to make a space for work that’s playful with those borders, it makes us happy when we read work that recognizes that we’re its people. And anyway, no work that’s fully comfortable in its genre lasts or bears a repeat visit. We like things that continue to twist us.

DIAGRAM the website only allows movements through space in traditional forward/backward/up/down directions. In your dream world, would DIAGRAM be able to move or show differently? And on a pseudo-related note, do you see the journal ever publishing video-poems or video-anything?

Though it’s true that more often than not we publish text or image or some combination, we have published video (and audio). We did an all-audio issue, for instance: 3.6. Or you can find a video essay in 14.4. Or an interactive fiction sort of review in 17.4, or an interactive piece by Ali Pearl in 16.3, just to name a few examples. People send us vastly fewer nontextual submissions than they do poems. I’d love to see (and publish) more nontextual submissions, but writers and artists working in those media are fewer and further between, probably in part because writing a damn fine poem is already pretty difficult. It’s not as if after four hundred years we’ve even solved something as restrictive and specific as the sonnet. If you add in the possibilities that open up for a poem or essay or story when you add video, then the complication (and the necessity for technical skill in multiple media) rises quickly. Because we’re online we’re able to publish multimedia stuff, so we like to do it when we get something special. I think it’s also that there are lots of artists doing great work in other media, but those artists aren’t used to submitting their work to “literary” magazines (and maybe they don’t even know what those are), so we may not even be on their radar.

And I’m not actually sure what you mean by movements through space. I mean, the online page isn’t exactly a space, though it makes it easier to talk about it as such (and even calling webpages “pages” betrays a kind of too-easy heuristic that belies how weird it is to be reading words that are made up of bits on a screen that is made of light). But I get your meaning: We do take a fairly traditional sense of the page as a default position: our design inspiration is largely taken from old print books that publish diagrams, and our typography is pretty traditional. But yet we’ve published work that goes well beyond that. I guess for me the thing that makes diagrams themselves interesting is the constraint inherent in representing something in a diminished form. Everything a good diagram diagrams is more complicated than it is, and occurs in at least one more dimension than a diagram operates in (though we also like those diagrams that fail in some marvelous way to do what they’re supposed to do—ditto with some work we publish: failure’s fine as long as it’s marvelous). So the challenge is trying to capture and lay open something of that complexity in an accessible way, which is something that one does in a poem or an essay or a story: try to compress or hook some aspect of the uncompressible and unhookable into something smaller that you can hold in your hand or mind for a little while at least.

Any words of advice for writers who like what you’re doing at DIAGRAM and want to submit their stuff?

The same advice everyone else gives always applies, because it’s correct advice: read the magazine before submitting. That’s not just good advice for improving your odds of submitting (though it will certainly do that), but we like to believe it’s good advice for improving (or expanding anyhow) your writing. Any contact you’re making with others’ well-thought through arrangements of words can only help. And if you spend some time with what we do and it doesn’t spark you, save both of us some time and find another place to send your work, because it’s pretty unlikely that we’re going to be a match for what you think you do.

Lightning round: name five books that either you or your editorial team have read recently that blew your mind.

Amy Benson, Seven Years to Zero

Not a book, but Hingston & Olsen’s Short Story Advent Calendar 2017.

Jim Harrison, Letters to Yesenin

Tyehimba Jess, Olio

Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us

Wendy S. Walters, Troy, Michigan

Annie Kim is the author of Into the Cyclorama, winner of the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as The Kenyon Review, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Four Way Review, Ninth Letter, and Crab Orchard Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Hambidge Center, Kim is an editor for DMQ Review and works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service. Uses for Music is the title of her second manuscript.